Saccharomyces cerevisiae strains sensitive to inorganic mercury

Summary In Saccharomyces cerevisiae, the HGS2-1 allele confers sensitivities to inorganis mercury (Ono and Sakamoto 1985) and to excess fermentable sugars such as glucose (Sakamoto et al. 1985); exogenous tyrosine antagonizes both inorganic mercury and excess glucose. In this sutdy, the inorganic mercury sensitive strain has been shown to have about twice more glucose-1,6-bisphosphate and slightly less pyruvate than the normal strains, suggesting that the inorganic mercury sensitive strain has the reduced aldolase activity. It has been also shown that the growth retarded cells accumulate trehalose, by which the lower level of glucos-6-phosphate in the inorganic mercury sensitive strain is accounted for, and that inorganic mercury, presumably excess glucose also, causes growth inhibition via depletion of cellular tyrosine. The mechanism how cellular tyrosine is depleted by inorganic mercury or excess glucose is accounted for by the facts that (1) the tyrosine uptake activity is decreased with increase of glucose concentration in growth medium, (2) HGS2-1 enhances the effect of glucose on the tyrosine uptake activity, and (3) inorganic mercury inhibits the tyrosine uptake system by binding to its SH-group(s). Thus, it is concluded that the role of tyrosine is not to detoxify inorganic mercury nor excess fermentable sugars but simply to counteract depletion of cellular tyrosine induced by them.